It is lunchtime, and most of the conference’s speakers are scattered through the refectory in a geopolitical pattern that Bayard and Simon have not yet figured out. The room consists of tables that can seat six to eight, none of them fully occupied. But—Simon and Bayard can scent this in the air—there are clearly various camps.
“I wish I could get a rundown on the different forces here,” says Bayard to Simon, choosing a double rib steak with mashed potato, plantains, and boudin blanc. The black chef, who overheard him, responds in French: “You see the table near the door? That’s where the analytics sit. They’re in enemy territory, and they’re outnumbered, so they’re sticking together.” There is Searle, Chomsky, and Cruella Redgrave, whose real name is Camille Paglia, a specialist in the history of sexuality and a direct rival of Foucault, whom she detests with all her being. “On the other side, near the window, there’s a belle brochette, as you say in France: Lyotard, Guattari, Cixous, and Foucault in the middle—you know him, of course, the tall bald guy who’s talking, right? Kristeva is over there, with Morris Zapp and Sylvère Lotringer, the boss of the magazine Sémiotext(e). In the corner, on his own, the old guy with the wool tie and the weird hair, I don’t know who that is. [Strange-looking man, thinks Bayard.] And the young lady with the violet hair behind him? I don’t know her, either.” His Puerto Rican sous-chef glances over and remarks tonelessly: “Probably Heideggerians.”
A professional reflex rather than any genuine interest prompts Bayard to ask how serious the rivalries between the professors are. In reply, the black chef just points at Chomsky’s table, where a young, mousy man is passing. Searle calls out to him:
“Hey, Jeffrey, you need to translate that asshole’s latest piece of crap for me.”
“Hey, John, I’m not your bitch. Do it yourself, okay?”
“Fine, dickhead. My French is good enough for that shit.”
The black chef and his Puerto Rican assistant burst out laughing and high-five each other. Bayard didn’t understand the dialogue, but he gets the idea. Behind him in the line, an impatient voice grumbles: “Can you move along, please?” Simon and Bayard recognize the young Arab who was on the plane with Foucault. He is holding a tray of chicken curry, purple potatoes, hardboiled eggs, and celery purée, but he does not have official accreditation so is held back at the checkout. Foucault, seeing this, starts to intervene, but Slimane signals that everything is fine, and after brief negotiations he is allowed through with his tray.
Bayard sits down next to Simon at the solitary old man’s table.
Then he sees Derrida arrive, recognizing him in spite of never having seen him before: head pulled into his shoulders, square-jawed, thin-lipped, eagle-nosed, wearing a corduroy suit, the top buttons of his shirt undone, silver hair springing up from his head like flames. He helps himself to couscous and red wine. He is accompanied by Paul de Man. The people at Searle’s table stop speaking, and so does Foucault. Cixous gestures to him but he doesn’t see her: his eyes have immediately sought and found Searle. A moment’s indecision, his meal tray in hand, then he goes over to join his friends. Cixous kisses him on both cheeks, Guattari pats him on the back, Foucault shakes his hand while looking surly (the consequence of an old article by Derrida, “Cogito and the History of Madness,” in which, roughly speaking, he suggested that Foucault had completely misunderstood Descartes). The young woman with violet hair also goes over to say hello: her name is Avital Ronell, she is a Goethe specialist and a great admirer of deconstruction.
Bayard observes the body language and facial expressions. He eats his boudin in silence while Simon talks about the program of events that lies on the table between them: “Have you seen? There’s a symposium on Jakobson. Shall we go?”
Bayard lights a cigarette. He almost feels like saying yes.
62
“The analytic philosophers are real drudges. They’re Guillermo Vilas, you know? They’re so boring. They spend hours defining their terms. For each argument, they never fail to write the premise, and then the premise of the premise, and so on. They’re fucking logicians. Essentially, they take twenty pages to explain stuff that could easily be summarized in ten lines. Weirdly, they often make exactly that criticism of the continentals, while also having a go at them for their unbridled whimsy, for not being rigorous, for not defining their terms, for writing literature rather than philosophy, for lacking the crucial mathematical spirit, for being poets, basically, guys who aren’t serious, who are like crazy mystics (even though they’re all atheists, ha!). But anyway, the continentals are more like McEnroe. At least they’re never boring.”
[Anonymous student, interviewed on campus.]
63
Simon is generally considered to have a reasonably good grasp of English, but oddly, what is considered reasonable in France, in terms of mastery of a foreign language, always seems to prove woefully inadequate in reality.
So Simon understands only about one word in three of Morris Zapp’s speech. In his defense, it has to be said that the subject—deconstruction—is not one he’s very familiar with, and involves some difficult, or at least obscure, concepts. But still, he was hoping to find it enlightening.
Bayard did not go with him, and Simon is pleased: he would have been unbearable.
Given that the content of the speech largely escapes him, he seeks meaning elsewhere: in Morris Zapp’s ironic inflections, in the audience’s knowing laughter (each member wishing to seal his rightful sense of belonging to the here-and-now of this amphitheater—“another amphitheater,” thinks Simon, succumbing to an unhealthy structuralist-paranoiac reflex to search for recurrent motifs), in the questions of the listeners, which are never really about the matter at hand but rather attempts if not to challenge the master, at least to position the questioner, in relation to the other listeners, as a serious thinker blessed with acute critical faculties and superior intellectual capacities (in a word, to distinguish the questioner, as Bourdieu would say). From the tone of each question, Simon can guess the asker’s situation: undergrad, postgrad, professor, specialist, rival … He can easily detect the bores, the wallflowers, the asslickers, the snobs, and—most numerous of all—those who forget to ask their question, so busy are they reeling off their interminable monologues, intoxicated by the sound of their own voices, driven by that imperious need to offer their opinion. Clearly, something existential is going on in this puppet theater.
But finally he does seize upon a passage that holds his attention: “The root of critical error is a na?ve confusion of literature with life.” This intrigues him, so he asks his neighbor, an Englishman in his forties, if he might be able to provide a sort of simultaneous translation, or at least summarize what’s being said, and as the Englishman, like half the campus and three-quarters of those at the conference, has very good French, he explains to Simon that according to Morris Zapp’s theory there is, at the source of literary criticism, an original methodological error of confusing life with literature (Simon redoubles his attention) whereas it is not the same thing, it does not function in the same way. “Life is transparent, literature opaque,” the Englishman tells him. (That’s arguable, thinks Simon.) “Life is an open system, literature a closed system. Life is made of things, literature of words. Life is what it seems to be: when you are afraid of flying, it is a question of fear. When you try to date a girl, it is a question of sex. But in Hamlet, even the most stupid critic realizes that it is not about a man who wants to kill his uncle—it is about something else.”
This reassures Simon slightly, as he doesn’t have the faintest idea what his adventures could be about.